He was a photographer to queens and divas, he chased Marilyn Monroe around her hotel room, intoxicating her with words and burning through three rolls of film. He was a costume designer, an Oscar-winning set designer, a socialite chronicler, an exhausted dandy, a mercurial artist.

This and much more was Cecil Beaton, who spanned the twentieth century and its many worlds. Beaton knew and photographed everyone, everyone knew Beaton and had their photographs taken by him: the British royals, Winston Churchill, Picasso, Greta Garbo, André Gide, Audrey Hepburn, Rudolf Nureyev, the Rolling Stones. Vain and subtle, fabulously gossipy and sometimes malicious, he recorded his existence, his art, his century in long diaries, from the Roaring Twenties to the din of war to the elegant disenchantment of old age.

With a sharp and theatrical gaze on himself and his surroundings, he poured introspection and worldliness, irony and melancholy into his daily chronicles: behind the glittering receptions at Court and the luminous portraits of Dietrich, Chanel, or the young Elizabeth II, he let his vulnerability shine through, his obsession with beauty, which he struggled to free from the tyranny of time throughout his life.

From that stream of private writings, Laura Grandi has constructed, with empathy and intelligence, an autobiography of Sir Cecil Beaton like you’ve never read before: over fifty years of friendships, travels, extraordinary encounters, and creative adventures, told in the sophisticated and contradictory voice of a major figure in British culture. A moving portrait of an unrepeatable era.

The magnificent work of an eccentric and meticulous diarist, ever aware that art, like life, is a stage.